This Day in Cold War History (Alger Hiss Indicted for Perjury)

December 15, 1948—In its last day of existence, a federal grand jury handed down an indictment of former State Department official Alger Hiss, with only one vote more than necessary to secure the charges. The trial involving Hiss and accuser Whittaker Chambers became not just a key moment in the Cold War, but also a cause celebre that British journalist Alistair Cooke called, in a book on the subject, A Generation on Trial.

Hiss faced only perjury charges because the statute of limitations had expired on espionage charges—and the espionage charges ended up beyond the statute of limitations because Chambers feared that he himself might also be charged, so he kept mum.

Initially, I thought, the Hiss-Chambers case would make a great movie. I mean, think of the plot elements: a pumpkin patch where a key piece of evidence is hidden; the spectacularly bad teeth that the elegant Hiss claims helps him to identify the unkempt Chambers; two antagonists almost polar opposites in appearance; and a spy case.

Thinking over recent biopics, however, I’m not so sure Hollywood would do well by it. Leave aside how you would persuade Oliver Stone, from whom so many Americans learn modern and even ancient history, to get his grubby hands off the project. No, Hollywood would still find a way to oversimplify this trial, if recent biographical treatments such as Milk, De-Lovely, or Good Night, and Good Luck are concerned.

But really, Hollywood can adapt this project with a minimum of sweat. You see, back in 1984, the PBS series “American Playhouse” aired the teleplay Concealed Enemies, by Hugh Whitemore. If nothing else, its casting penetrates to the heart of why Hiss ultimately went to jail for perjury.

Edward Herrmann played Hiss as arrogant, while John Harkins depicted Chambers as almost spectacularly tortured. (Peter Riegert, leaving his Animal House days behind, lent crucial support as Richard Nixon, steering away from the obvious post-Watergate stereotype of an out-and-out crook in favor of something more subtle: a young politician in a hurry continually worried that his Congressional committee’s star witness is so unstable that he’ll sink not just the anti-communist investigation but any hopes of higher public office for Nixon.)

In a memo, Nixon wrote that Hiss was “rather insolent toward me,” and you can’t help but wonder if that act of lese majesty sparked the young congressman’s subsequent crusade. If you want to identify what the future President was talking about, this remark by the well-heeled Hiss—former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., longtime Roosevelt administration official, part of FDR’s entourage at Yalta—will serve as well as any other: "I graduated from Harvard. I heard your school was Whittier."

Years later, Hiss still didn’t get it, displaying an almost Frasier Crane-style smugness. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigating his case, he noted, “wasn’t very bright, wasn’t very alert, and didn’t think the way I did.” You get the sense reading this that the first two points followed, in Hiss’s mind, as a natural consequence of the last.

Even his friends didn’t do Hiss much good in the end. When asked to comment on his conviction at his second trial (the first ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict), Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, observed, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” As if that weren’t enough, he pointed out a passage in Matthew 25:36: “Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

All well and good, but I can’t imagine that Acheson would have displayed similar compassion for Joseph P. Kennedy. Don’t get me wrong: the Kennedy patriarch’s manipulations, buying of people and votes, anti-semitism, and appeasement advocacy while Ambassador to the Court of St. James fill me with nothing but contempt.

When he fell from power in the latter position in 1940, the Washington establishment—including Acheson—properly turned its back on Kennedy. But that ostracism derived as much from the fact that, in the Establishment’s mind, Kennedy was a pushy Irish upstart as from any real transgressions. Put it another way: whatever his sins, Joe Kennedy was not a traitor. In contrast, Hiss was indubitably a member of “the club” who could be forgiven.

Or could he? In the “Inferno” section of The Divine Comedy, Dante reserves the lowest, ninth circle of hell for traitors, for treason is an icy sin of judgment. If Hiss was indeed a spy—and the solidifying historical consensus, given the disclosure of the Venona encrypts that point to him as the operative code-named “Alles” and Allan Weinstein’s influential summary of the case, Perjury, is that he was—it would be far harder to forgive him.

Even now, when Richard Nixon, propelled into national prominence by the case, has long passed from the scene, the Hiss-Chambers case remains startlingly relevant. As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan revealed in his book Secrecy, the U.S. army decoded Soviet cables corroborating espionage charges against Hiss as well as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but never revealed their existence, even to President Truman. One result was liberal-conservative strife over the extent of Soviet espionage.

A second reason why attention must be paid to this case was outlined by historian Ron Rosenbaum: “It reminds us that the failure to resolve divisive questions about the secret history of our time, the failure to address the ineptness of American ‘intelligence" in the past, the unresolved cases and bad judgments that riddle the record of our clandestine services have paved the way for contemporary intelligence fiascoes up to and including the failure to ‘connect the dots’ before 9/11, and the claim that the case for finding WMD in Saddam's Iraq would be a ‘slam dunk.’”